Remembering Thelma — a tribute | New Jersey Jewish News

Thelma Kahn Purdy left us. She was a few days short of her 99th birthday. My heart and soul weep. And yet I smile and even laugh. Such was Thelma!

Her memorial service last week, at the overflowing shul, as packed as if it were Yom Kippur, was moving, powerful, touching, sad, beautiful, and if you can believe it, very funny. Just like Thelma! If only there were more Thelmas in our troubled world.

She was exceptional. She was brilliant, beloved by a huge cadre of family and friends. She was low-key but a true politician, who could teach today’s candidates for office about launching a campaign based on truth and honor and ma’asim tovim, good deeds and honorable commitments. She repeatedly was elected to the Clark Township Board of Education. She served for eight terms. It seemed effortless. When she ran, she won, always in first place of course. Her voice on that board was always heard, its quiet strength always persuasive, always correct, and always followed. I wish she had run for president — of the United States. Then we would have our vaccine research, our free press, our strong universities, our moral foreign relations minus ignorant tariffs, our unyielding law firms, our powerful and principled justice system and truly supreme Supreme Court, world peace, total lack of pervasive dishonesty and governmental criminality, and lack of gilt and greed. We would have a better world, for us as Jews, and for all those who seek peace.

I’m sorry to say that Thelma never ran for any other office. Education was her beat! Alas, she had no other aspirations, although RBG was her idol.

In our suburban New Jersey synagogue, however, she was highly powered and highly propelled. She organized endless provocative programs, teaching and leading and serving as a beacon to all. She brought our little shul fame and renown as a profound destination for serious learning about Jewish issues, classical or topical. When she introduced a speaker, which she did countless times, she was smooth, not slick, and well prepared, always providing important background information. She also made us laugh at the Sol Sern lectures, which featured Jewish comedy, to honor the memory of that deeply funny beloved man and friend.

At home, three children showed the mantle of her parenting by their amazing success in challenging professions. No doubt their famous names are known to you. She and Art — her beloved husband, Art Purdy — well deserved the pride of ownership of those kids.

On the other hand, sometimes going out for lunch with Thelma was a bit of a torture. She always had to get it right and usually wound up with an uninspiring tuna fish sandwich. But, reaching the decisive time when the waiter was already understanding that even though he had served this lady many times before, this would be no quick transaction, she ultimately got to the sandwich. Again!

It has been almost a century since her birth in Brooklyn, but she was a true product of our own New Jersey. She amazed and delighted for all those years. With her dry, very very dry wit, an extraordinary subtle sense of humor, and deep understanding of life and living, her love of literature and absolutely total intolerance of television, meaning their home never had one of those newfangled devices that set out to take a person away from their books and games. She was unique in all the best ways. I still chuckle when a program written by her Emmy Award-winning son was on TV and she needed to come to our house to watch it.

She was truly the only person I ever knew who made homemade applesauce. That may sound like a quirk rather than a virtue, but it was a simple sign of her authenticity. Her applesauce didn’t come from a jar. Period! Even my mother, mistress of labor-intense food like blintzes and stuffed cabbage, never made applesauce. Thelma always made applesauce, and it was delicious, much tastier than the stuff in the jars, the ubiquitous stuff we ate, if we ate applesauce at all. And meals she served to us, when we were happy to be her guests, were always without artifice. She never tried to be fancy, to bring out china, crystal, silver, that would impress some, but not us. We knew better. Just being with her was impressive.

When we first moved into our suburban town, we knew no one, not Thelma, not her husband, Art, no one at all. We had heard about a town with lots of young Jewish families, a thriving shul, convenient location for jobs and family, houses that we could own if we struggled enough to buy one. We found it, put down more money than we thought we had, certainly more than we could afford, and moved our little family into it; we were one young couple still in our early 20s, parents to one baby girl, just months old, and one middle-aged dog called Gringo, a true bitch, in the literal sense of the word, and even in the nasty more profane usage, a dog who was yet to travel the world like a Zionist, but continued to hold all children in disdain, including those who were Jews who lived with her.

Thus we settled in. Our goal was to make friends, people who we would grow up with and grow old with, Jewish people who shared our values and lifestyles. At the helm were Thelma and her profoundly intellectual poet of a husband, Art. They were a bit older than we, a decade or more, but they were irresistible. And the few extra years of maturity could lead us around the block, as they say. And so it was!

The memories are everlasting. Human beings, however, are not. Our job is to transmit and remember because life itself does not continue forever. Never ever. But our stories can, and will. I donate to our story bank the life of Thelma. May she rest in peace!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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